American colleges and universities are being challenged to do something about the frequency of sexual assaults on their campuses. In connection with the release of a task force study in late April, Vice President Joe Biden offered a shocking statistic —that one in five women is assaulted in her college years.

In fact, that assertion is in the first paragraph of the executive summary of the task force report:

“One in five women is sexually assaulted in college. Most often, it’s by someone she knows — and also most often, she does not report what happened. Many survivors are left feeling isolated, ashamed or to blame. Although it happens less often, men, too, are victims of these crimes.”

Washington Post fact checkers determined that the statistic came from a 2007 study, “The Campus Sexual Assault Study,” which was done for the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice. Researchers used a Web-based survey to sample 5,446 undergraduate women between ages 18 and 25. The survey was anonymous, and participants received a $10 gift certificate.

The result: 19 percent of the women said they had experienced attempted or completed sexual assaults since entering college. The researchers later disclosed that 19 percent of the seniors surveyed reported actual sexual assaults.

That doesn’t mean that they reported the attacks to authorities. We know that only about 35 percent of the victims of rape and other sexual assaults, for various reasons, report them to police. Frequently, alcohol is involved, and victims may be ashamed and unclear about what happened.

If colleges and universities have a growing problem with sexual assaults, that would seem to run contrary to national crime trends. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that rates of sexual violence have dropped in recent decades. Nationally, the rate of rapes and sexual assaults declined from a peak of 5 per 1,000 women and girls in 1995 to 1.8 per 1,000 in 2010.

The president’s task force, therefore, wants to determine first the extent of the problem on America’s college campuses. A new Web site, NotAlone.gov, provides a wealth of information and resources for students and schools.

The Obama administration will provide colleges with sample questions and other materials to develop a campus survey, with a goal of requiring all institutions to conduct a survey by 2016.

Congress tried to address this problem, as well as other college crimes, in 1990 with the passage of the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act. Named after a Lehigh University freshman who was raped and murdered in her dormitory in 1986, the law requires colleges and universities to publish annual reports on crime statistics, including sex offenses.

Unfortunately, the act has had too many loopholes, according to a May 26 cover piece by Time magazine. The article cited a report by the Center for Public Integrity that said 77 percent of 2- and 4-year institutions reported zero rapes in 2006, in part by defining acquaintance rapes as “non-forcible” and excluding rapes at off-campus parties.

The problem, of course, is that college officials don’t want crime statistics to get in the way of recruiting and fund-raising. News organizations have traditionally found it difficult to get crime reports from campus police. Many victims of sexual assaults are first sent to school counselors, some of whom may discourage victims from filing public reports. Better to handle things internally, they reason.

The U.S. Department of Education is now using Title IX, the 1972 law that combats gender discrimination in college sports, to require the institutions to address sexual violence at the risk of losing federal funding.

That practice eventually put the University of Montana in Missoula, a school of nearly 15,000 students, under the federal microscope. In 2012 the Justice Department opened an investigation after 80 reports of rape on campus within three years.

After the release of the task force report, the Obama administration released a list of 55 colleges and universities that will be investigated for possible violations of federal law over their handling of sexual violence and harassment complaints.

The list includes such major universities as Ohio State, Harvard, Princeton, Southern California, Florida State, Michigan, Michigan State, Penn State and Southern Methodist.

No Arkansas institutions are on the list. That doesn’t mean our state schools are without problems. An Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article in May examined Clery reports for 2012 and found that the University of Arkansas system had 10 reports of forcible sex offenses, eight of them at UA-Fayetteville and the other two at UA-Pine Bluff.

The University of Central Arkansas reported six offenses, Henderson State University has three, and Arkansas State University-Jonesboro, Arkansas Tech and Southern Arkansas University had two each.

A later story said the Washington County prosecutor had decided not to press charges in a 2013 UAF case, which involved an alleged rape at a fraternity house. Two other cases involving alleged sexual assaults at the same house, one in 2012 and the other early in 2013, also resulted in no charges.

The official conclusion then is that no crime occurred, and maybe that’s true.

Nevertheless, our colleges and universities must tackle the difficult problem of sexual assaults openly and effectively — for the sake of their students.

Next week: What the task force recommends.

Roy Ockert is editor emeritus of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.